While different scorers might have very different reactions to a subject that saw a bunny in one blot, for example, the use of color and white space was thought to be something more observable than opinionated. However, the controversy about the test is far from 'blotted out' by Exner's system. Despite its use in court-ordered assessments of mental stability and the fact that "a great strength of Exner's system was thought to be the availability of normative scores for various populations…beginning in the mid-1990s others began to attempt to replicate or update these norms, and found they could not" (Berger 2005). Current critics would answer the question: 'when should the Rorschach be used vs. multiple-choice methods such as the MMPI' with an empathetic 'never!' The Exner system seems to convey the 'worst of both worlds' in its scoring methods. The Exner system was supposed to eliminate subjective bias, but standardized interpretations of different projected uses of the inkblots that are then compared to a database of responses is not so different than using the multiple choice format of the MMPI. The MMPI is far easier to grade and poses less risk of subjective or untrained analysis in its scoring. Ultimately, personality tests...
The chance of error is simply too great: "if the assessment is too broad, the analyzer can make such definite assertions as "a patient who attends only to a small part of the blot is 'indicative of obsessive personality;' while one who sees figures which are half-human and half-animal indicates that he is alienated, perhaps on the brink of schizophrenic withdrawal from people" (Carroll 2008). Finally, problems arise in compiling a significantly broad cross-cultural sample of projected responses to suit the needs of an increasingly diverse population, who may use white space, color, and shading in a different manner.
Rorschach inkblot test is a projective personality test that has been one of the major projective personality assessments used by psychologists since the 1940s (Aiken & Groth-Marnat, 2006). The test is named after Hermann Rorschach who developed the inkblots in 1921. The Rorschach inkblot test consists of 10 cards with inkblots on them (five black and white and five colored) and is currently marketed by Pearson Assessments. The test is
In other words, instead of simply asking the patient what he sees in the inkblot, the clinician will say something like 'To you does this image look more like a person, an animal, a flower, or a food?' Juni (1993) asserts that this approach reduces the need for "trained judges" to interpret the results, and also provides a sense of standardization that maximizes the projective content. The phenomenon known as
Psychology is an ever evolving science. While some still feel it is a pseudoscience, many researchers have shown the benefits of applied psychology and the effects mental health can have on an individual. However, because problems of the mind are not so easy to measure as they would be in biology, there tends to be a lot of guessing and misinterpretation. Businesses, schools, and the government use personality tests to
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